The Joe Rogan Experience - #2079 - Brigham Buhler

Episode Date: December 27, 2023

Brigham Buhler is the founder of Ways2Well, a functional and regenerative care clinic, and a cofounder of its sister company, ReviveRx: a pharmacy focusing on health, wellness, and restorative medicine.https://www.ways2well.com

the Joe Rogan experience we're back we're back what's cracking same stuff new day yeah sort of the war on peptides is going on right now. It is. It's interesting. To explain it is going to take a little bit of time, but I'd love to dig into it. Yeah, let's explain it because there is no reason why they would be banning these things other than for their own profit. You got it. You get the gist of it. That's the only reason. There is no danger that these things are causing.

There's no public health concern. There's no people dropping dead. But meanwhile, people are dropping dead from the ones that they have sanctioned. Yeah, and so I like to tell people what you're seeing is a symptom of a disease. And the same thing we do in healthcare. We don't talk about the symptoms. We don't treat this. We, we, we unfortunately do treat the symptom and not the root cause of the disease. And so to diagnose what the real issue is, we've got to dig a little deeper into the history and what's going on there.

And, uh, it's a pretty insidious disease and it's spread throughout all of the government. And that disease is private industry and its influence on the federal government and the decisions they make. And we're going to talk a little bit about large language models later in the future of what I think health care is. But one of the critiques of large language models is it's only as good as the data you put in. And I would argue that humanity is no different. It is only as good as the data you put in. And I would argue that humanity is no different. It is only as good as the data that you put in. And so if the federal government and the FDA is going to allow an open door policy with big pharma,

they're going to come to the conclusions and decisions and policies that benefit big pharma. And so if we take a little walk through history, you'll see time and time again how this has happened. So I'm going to jump way back first, if you're good with this. So you go way back. There was a small little company that reached out to the Third Reich and said, hey, we need 150 participants for our clinical trial. The Nazi regime shipped 150 healthy Jewish women to this pharmaceutical company to test its products. Literally within six months, there's letters

back to the Third Reich from this pharmaceutical company saying, thank you so much for your cooperation. The women arrived in great health and working order. Unfortunately, none of them made it through the initial phases of our trial. They killed 150 women. We kindly request that you send us another 150 women. which is now a mega pharmaceutical company and i say that because right that was the 50s it would have changed by now that was forever ago right the world's a different place we would never allow that today jump forward post-world war ii i talked about this on rfk's podcast eisenhower had that you said it was the 50s it couldn't have been the the 50s. Well, the 40s. Sorry. And so Eisen, jump forward to, is there a way to turn the volume down? Yeah, there's a button or knob right there. There we go. So jump forward to Eisenhower's speech, his famous speech about the military industrial complex. What a lot of people don't realize is there was a second half to that speech where eisenhower warned the american people about the

medical industrial complex he warned that if we allow private industry to control monopolize and profiteer off of health and health care that they will silo innovation stifle innovation and capitalize and monetize innovation and i would would argue that's 100% what we've seen. And it's continuing. So, and the reason I want to walk the public through this is because to understand what's going on, you've got to see the history of how it's happened. So now you jump forward to the 80s. Okay. Time and time again, when big pharma has had an opportunity to choose left or right, over and over again, they have chose profits over patient outcomes. So 1980s, Bayer launches a hemophilia drug.

They inadvertently contaminate thousands of specimens with HIV. They know that they've contaminated specimens with HIV, this drug with HIV virus. What do they do? They have a decision, destroy all of it or ship it to the public anyway. They shipped it into third world countries, Africa and Asian markets and infected 20,000 people with the HIV virus. What? This is the 80s when it was a death sentence. And so I say that to set the groundwork for why would they ban peptides?

Look at this from this article. Division of the pharmaceutical company Bayer sold millions of dollars of blood clotting medicine for hemophiliacs, medicine that carried a high risk of transmitting AIDS to Asia and Latin America in the mid-1980s while selling a new, safer product in the West, according to documents obtained by the New York Times. Holy shit. And two, everything I referenced, Jamie, because this was something last time, I am going to mention a lot of controversial stuff. So I've listed reference after reference after reference on the Ways to Well website.

Anything that I reference will be on there as well. But so jump forward, they infect all these people with HIV. Okay. In the 80s, compounding pharmacies and specialty pharmacies and generic manufacturers attempted to create HIV treatment options that were affordable for third world countries. HIV treatment options that were affordable for third world countries. Because at the time, it was like $14,000 a month for an HIV treatment to keep you alive. Nobody could afford that in those countries. So what happens? Does big pharma in a market they can't sell, in a market they can't touch, in a market where they inadvertently infected, or I would say almost knowingly infected 20,000 people with HIV.

They then lobby with the U.S. government, file and sue the shit out of all of these companies that were attempting to make cost-effective generics. It caught it up in litigation for three years before finally they bent to the will of the American people and the feedback of the public. There was outrage over this. And finally, after three years of litigation, big pharma said, basically, screw it. Go ahead and give them the HIV. Let them make these HIV meds in these countries that aren't buying our product anyway. And so I just say all this so you know the people we're dealing with, right? And then you jump forward to the opioid crisis, which was predicated by the volume crisis of the, I think that was the 40s or 50s.

And so time and time again. And so how does the FDA come to these conclusions? It's because a majority of their funding comes from private industry and a majority of their discussion, their talk track, their discussion, their talk track, their influence, their belief systems, and their thought processes are being influenced by these companies. So when we talk about peptides today in specific, there's over 7,000 peptides on the market. Okay. What peptides didn't get banned? That answers the question in itself. The GLP-1 agonists, insulin, those aren't banned. Those are all patented peptides. These are peptides.

These are short chain amino acids found naturally in nature. They were patented for the dosage and delivery mechanism because you cannot patent a molecule. You can only patent the delivery mechanism and the dosage. a molecule. You can only patent the delivery mechanism and the dosage. And so the FDA allows all those peptides, but it's because big pharma is monetizing them and big pharma has their ear. And so we talked a little bit about this on the last podcast, and I didn't dig as deep because we didn't have as much time. We just burned so much time covering all of this crap. But one of the things I saw is it goes beyond the FDA. This insidious virus that this disease state that we're seeing the symptoms of carries all the way into the DEA, the DOJ. When I was a when I owned my own pharmacies and labs that build insurance, that was one of the things I was talking about. I hired a

former Department of Justice prosecutor to come in and help me build out my compliance program. And he told me, Brigham, when I was at the DOJ, we had an open meeting every month with the heads of the pharmacy benefit managers, where they would come with stacks of papers, books of papers of people that they wanted us to federally indict. Okay. And so as I begin to layer this, you'll understand where this is going. So indict, if they can't indict someone, if they did nothing wrong, right, that would be the lens that the average American has. So let me explain. You have a, let's say I build a blood lab, which I did. And I go out and I educate clinicians on the importance of running comprehensive blood work. I go to the insurance companies and I say, I would like to be in network with you, United, Cigna, Aetna. Their response is

go pound sand. We're not taking any more in-network contracts. So my options at that point are to lay everyone off, shut down and go home, or bill them out of network. The issue with billing them out of network. And so the patients understand or the listeners, you're paying for out-of-network benefits and you're paying these big companies, these big insurance companies for the right to be able to choose where you get your blood work done, your blood work analysis, all of these things. What ends up happening is if you're out of network as a lab, as any of these, whether it's a blood lab, a genetic screening lab, like Gary talked about the MTFHR test, the motherfucker test, we were doing that eight,

nine years ago. That was one of the tests we offered was this gene carrier test to identify the root cause of why people are having these issues. Any of it, insurance said, no, we're not going to let you in network. So you're forced to bill out of network. What does that mean? They pay me 30% of bill charges. So if it costs costs me 300 and i need to make 350 i now have to basically bill the insurance 1 000 to get paid my 350 are you following me yes okay now what the insurance companies do is they wait till i've billed them millions and millions of dollars then they go sit down at a desk with the Department of Justice and they say, look at this. This motherfucker billed us a thousand dollars a test on a test that should

have been three hundred and fifty dollars. Right. And I'm not blaming the Department of Justice. They are acting upon the information that they are given. Right. They are being fed bad information by bad players. And that leads to bad decisions. And at that point, if they bring forth a case on somebody, you're done. And so it's a terrifying space. And it's in every branch of the government. There's such a long reach of the ability to impress upon people. So they're almost influencing decision making through enforcement rather than through legislation right so the checks and balances are being cut out from under the American people because there is no checks or balance does that make sense at all and so

this is what I explained again on RFK was but but if you didn't do anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about. When I started this, the head of the DOJ who I hired to help me with compliance, he told me, there's two things that will get you in trouble with the Department of Justice. A lot of money and bad facts. So if you're a successful entrepreneur, you're going to generate a lot of money. successful entrepreneur, you're going to generate a lot of money. And if you get on the wrong side of a pharmacy, I mean, not a pharmacy benefit, of an insurance company, they're going to generate the bad facts. And now you're a target. And now you're on the Department of Justice target list. So doctors, it's beyond them being scared of getting kicked off contract to run these tests. It's beyond them being scared of the insurance companies

cutting their reimbursements or not allowing them to participate in their plans. They're scared for their liberties and their freedoms. If they get on the wrong side of an insurance carrier, they're going to use the justice system as an attack dog to take you out. And this is the honest to God truth. I saw people who were innocent, who did nothing wrong, get federally indicted. And if you understand anything about that process, the more you know, the more fucking terrifying it is. It's terrifying, Joe, because as soon as they indict you, you're done in the court of public opinion. Right. They release something in a way that makes it look like you're this terrible human. They skew the facts through the lens

of the insurance companies. And so the insurance companies are essentially saying, hey, Department of Justice, we built the case for you. Here it is. Look, these guys billed us $3 million. They fraudulently billed us and ran up the cost of health care. And that's the path they take. And then once you're on their radar, you don't get to present your half of the

case. So to get an indictment, all it takes is a prosecutor presenting to a jury of your peers, which in the state of Texas has an eighth grade literacy level. And they say, hey, these guys build, you know, United $5 million last year on lab tests that United say should have been, you know, $800,000. Do you think there's enough info to dig deeper? That's all an indictment is. Yeah, there's enough info to dig deeper. That sounds like bad facts and a lot of money, right? But now it goes beyond that. 90 plus percent of the time, once they've indicted you, they file for an asset seizure. And so if you're an orthopedic surgeon and you were invested in one of these models with labs, all of a sudden you get indicted, they seize your ability to defend yourself. All your bank accounts

are cleared. They can seize your cars. They can take your assets. And it's terrifying. And I'm not saying this to say the DOJ is bad. I don't think they're bad at all. I think they're given bad information. And heretofore, they act in accordance with the information they're given. And it's the same thing with the FDA. The FDA is acting in accordance with... Merck is looking at over 200 peptides for patent. Okay. They're actively investigating over 200. Ibutamorin, which is on the ban list, just popped up. Phase two FDA trials with another pharmaceutical company. It's on the ban list, but it's in FDA trials now so they can patent it and monetize it and have a monopoly on it.

And what does it do? Ibutamorin is the one that helps stimulate growth hormone. People use it for weight loss and growth hormone production. It's a precursor. And it's, again, it's a safe drug, but it's not even a drug. Again, it's a peptide. And so peptides are short chain amino acids. And the only reason I go down the path of the DOJ stuff is to just give the public the awareness of it's beyond the FDA. It's in all branches of the government. And bad info in equals bad decisions out. And so I think that this is, you know, if you look at it from a different lens, I go, okay, when I try to sit in the seat of an FDA decision maker, I look at it and say,

to play devil's advocate, you know, it's one of two things. Do you think the peptides dangerous? Do you think these short chain amino acids are dangerous? Because if so, you're allowing big pharma to use them. And there's no data that shows that any of these peptides that are on the banned list are dangerous, like BPC-157. And when I say banned list, let me step back on that. They didn't ban the peptides, they reclassified the peptides under a category of dangerous. And through that, they indirectly have killed the market on those peptides because most doctors in America are not going to write a drug that's on an FDA dangerous list because it opens them up to litigation and risk. And what is the, like, how do they classify something as dangerous? Don't they have to have some kind of evidence? In this instance, there's

no evidence. There's literally, and even if you look at adverse events that have been reported across the United States, almost all those adverse events are black market. Any adverse event regarding BPC-157 is literally a black market product that somebody bought from China or Canada that's filled with potential particulates or issues of contamination or lack of efficacy or too much efficacy. And so where I was going with this is if you we know for sure that the peptide itself isn't dangerous. So then you go and say, OK, do you not think that FDA regulated compounding pharmacies are capable of compounding these peptides? The highest paid person in my building is my quality and compliance guy.

He literally worked for Abbott Laboratories for 15 years, working hand in hand with the FDA to make sure they follow all of their protocols and procedures. So just so the public knows, any product that comes into our pharmacy at Revive, our compounding pharmacy, we make sure it's an FDA approved ingredient with an independent third party verification of the ingredient itself, right? Showing that it is 100% the ingredients they tell us it is. Then we compound it in an ISO 5 environment. The law says we need to do ISO 7. We go above and beyond

and use an ISO 5 sterile facility. We have the two highest paid employees in our building are our regulatory compliance guys that are over quality controls. OK, so then from there, whenever we compound a product, we send every single batch off to be independently third party verified by a independent lab unaffiliated with us. And we file those records away. Everything is documented. and we file those records away, everything is documented.

Every aspect from the chain of custody of the ingredient to the chain of custody of the drug to the delivery to the patient. All of that is documented. So it's either one, you're saying the peptide's dangerous, or two, you're saying compounding pharmacies are incapable of compounding drugs that aren't dangerous. And if that's the case, then why are you asking us to compound hundreds of drugs that are on FDA backorder lists because your buddies at Big Pharma

aren't gonna compound them because they don't make enough money. They don't generate enough revenue. So half the stuff that's on a crash cart used in the hospital system is made by mom and pop compounding pharmacies. It's like, so the safety is there. The efficacy is there.

The sterility is there. And the peptide itself is safe. So I just go back to, I have to believe that you're acting upon bad information. And I want to give them the benefit of the doubt. And, you know, my message is we've got to go meet with the FDA and we've got to start having conversations and we've got to represent small compounding pharmacies and the average American, because right now they're only hearing half the story. And that half of the story is big pharma banging on the desk and saying, hey, we want to patent these peptides. We're going to go through clinical

trials. We're going to do it the right way, you know, and we're going to do all these checks and balances. But it's like, we don't need you involved in supplements. Like if you really look at it, it's, it's essentially, I mean, again, I've said it, it's a short chain amino acid. It's not a drug. short chain amino acid it's not a drug it's just bananas that it's that corrupt yeah it really is it is and you going and having a conversation with the fda in my mind that's not going to fix jack shit they're going to listen to you and they go okay yeah well the other end is what what's going to happen if they really truly continue to regulate these things out of the marketplace is you're not going to regulate it. You're just going to shut down the people that follow the rules. You're going

to shut down the compounding pharmacies that do things right. And here's an example, like, let's talk about the peptides that didn't get banned, the GLP-1s, which is what a lot of people know as Wagovi, Ozempic. The generic names are Trizepatide and semaglutide. Weight loss drugs, GLP-1 agonists, those are not on the banned list because FDA has, or Big Pharma has patents on those. But they can't patent the molecule, right? They can only patent the dosage and the brand name. So compounding pharmacies throughout the country are compounding those products for pennies on the dollar at a different dosage. And then what happens is, and that's because these products are on an FDA backorder list. Okay. This is the whole cycle of the ludicrousness of this situation. The FDA is saying, hey, there's not enough of

this product to meet the demand of the American people. And if we really look at what those drugs are, they're not a weight loss drug. They're a diabetes medication. And we know that diabetes indirectly impact or directly impacts poverty stricken and minority communities disproportionately. And so when we compound these medications to meet the needs of the people who can't get those medications or maybe can't afford those medications because they're on an FDA back order list and they're asking us to compound them, Big Pharma then turns around and sues compounding pharmacies throughout the country, then uses their long reach of PR firms to put it in the news, make it sound like

you don't know what you're doing. Like these compounding pharmacies are dangerous. They're not regulated. It's the wild west out there in compounding pharmacies. There's no oversight. These aren't FDA approved products. Bullshit. Absolute bullshit. Do you know how many times the FDA has been in my pharmacy in 18 months? Twice. We've interacted with them four times in 18 months. Do you know that there are 2,500 manufacturing facilities owned by Big Pharma that have not been inspected in five or more years? Five or more years. Furthermore, they've outsourced their manufacturing to third world countries and rural areas.

And those products, when they come into the United States, do not go under FDA inspection. There is no validity testing like we do. There's no sterility testing. There's none of that. And so why are GLP-1s on backorder? You want to know why? Sure.

Because Eli Lilly specifically, with its product, got one of their facilities shut down because they failed FDA inspection with egregious actions. We saw just a few weeks ago eye drops that are from FDA from FDA approved sources got recalled. And when a whistleblower blew the whistle, they go in and there's people in their isosteryl rooms barefoot. Like the level of egregiousness and manipulation is insane. But when you control the media and you have the ear of the government and you can move chess pieces, it makes it hard to, you know, be able to navigate that, compete with that, and educate people. And so if you didn't give me a platform, nobody would know this stuff. If it wasn't for people like you and Robert Kennedy and people who question things and challenge the system, I can't SEO optimize.

I can't Google search engine optimize. I can't get these messages out. I called a PR firm to say, hey, how do we combat this and what can we do? And they were like, the best bet you have is long form media like podcasts. That's really the only way you're going to get it out there. It's not going to be something picked up by the media outlets. Because they're dirty too. Well, a lot of their advertising and funding comes from big pharma. And so it makes it tough. Well, we found that out during the pandemic.

But what's fascinating is it's had a terrible effect on their bottom line. Because people watch them shill for these pharmaceutical drug companies and not report adverse events and not report the dangers of shutting down schools, and all the harm that it's doing to children, all the harm that it's doing to business, because they didn't report on that, people lost faith in them.

Yep. Like radically. CNN showed recently its lowest rating since 1991. Well, look at what they did with you with the vaccines. And I don't know if you saw it now. Two different articles in the last 60 days, probably. One is that people who have been vaccinated multiple times over, I think, the age of 60 are at an increased risk of being hospitalized with COVID was one of the articles.

And then the other article was that two of the heads of the FDA that approved the vaccines now went to go work for Moderna in the last 40 years. Okay. The last 40 years of the FDA, two heads of the FDA have not gone to work for industry. Only two. That's nuts. That's insanity. And so and that's the same thing that was happening at the DOJ. And that's why I wanted to bring up the DOJ. And as well, even though that they have nothing to do with the peptides, they are part of the the healthcare industrial complex inadvertently, because they're being used as an attack dog by the big insurance companies. And all it takes is one orthopedic surgeon getting indicted for something or one general surgeon getting indicted for something for everyone to go fuck that i'm

done i'm not doing that test i'm not doing a genetic test like no way and and now insurance doesn't even cover any of those tests and so they're going to force anything out of the marketplace with time but in the short term they're going to run their offense. And that same level of spit that's being swapped at the FDA is being swapped at the DOJ. So the big insurance companies attempt to recruit away DOJ prosecutors. And once they've built their reputation in working as a steward for the people at the Department of Justice, and they put some big hides on the wall and build a name for themselves, they'll get recruited to private industry. And one of the big options for them is to go work for the insurance companies, including the FBI agents. And I say this because

I don't think the average clinician in America even understands. When you have an insurance special investigative unit show up at your practice, which happens. So if you run a lot of blood tests or you do a lot of genetic tests, or you do anything that the insurance company thinks, man, this guy's doing these tests. I don't want him doing these tests anymore. There's a chance that they send an auditor and that auditor is a special investigative unit. And that guy is typically a former FBI agent that worked for the federal government, who still has all those connections at the office. And so there's just so much cross-pollination. And again, it's not me saying the DOJ is bad or the FDA is bad. I'm saying

when they're given bad information, just like AI, information in, information out. Why would they be upset at people running tests? Well, this gets super complicated. We talked about this on the last podcast. So there's laws, rules, and regs. And the state and federal laws say that physicians are allowed to have an investment in an entity. So a lot of people don't know that. Like when you go to a surgery center, there's a good chance that that surgeon owns into that surgery center.

Okay. If you go to, if you have a clinician, like somebody from the mothership, they couldn't get, they could not get their GLP-1, some egotide. So they reached out to me and said, hey, can you get my dad someglotide? And I'm like, yeah, we make it at the pharmacy. The doctor wouldn't send to our pharmacy. And it's most likely because he had a relationship with another pharmacy, right? And so that physician may have been invested in that pharmacy. And as crazy as that sounds, the law says they can as long as you don't pay them on the value or volume of their referral, they're allowed to have a passive interest. So think of it as you're investing in a stock. If I work at Abbott, if I'm a doctor and I prescribe a drug from Pfizer, I'm still allowed to invest in Pfizer stock. What I'm not allowed to do is receive direct remuneration in accordance with the value or volume of my referral. It cannot be an arrangement where you say, I'm going to give you $100 per patient.

That's a kickback. That's illegal. That's a violation of federal and state law. a bona fide investment opportunity and a hundred clinicians buy into a hospital and then they operate at that hospital, the law says they're allowed to own into that hospital and own up to 40% of that hospital. And so again, and two, I always like to give both sides of the story. And I said this on the last podcast, there are bad people doing bad things throughout every aspect of this. It's not insurance companies are all bad and clinicians are all good and lab owners are all good. There is egregious stuff happening at all levels. And there are indictments that the Department of Justice bring forth that are 100%

justified. No arguments there. But oftentimes, the baby gets thrown out with the bathwater. And oftentimes, the insurance companies are able to skew facts in a way that put innocent people in bad positions. And that's all I'm trying to say. it it it's so deep and go run so deep it take us seven podcasts to cover all this stuff but i mean it's it's real it's it's not foo foo stuff it's real what's happening every day and most people have zero idea this is happening and most people just look at the recommendations whatever it is whether it's been discussed in the media whether their doctor tells them and they don't have any idea what the influence behind that is. Correct. Correct. It's tough. I mean, it's tough. It's nuts. But the side effect profile safe on the peptides, like there's the efficacy, like time and time again, I cannot tell you how many people, how many patients and clinicians who buy BPC for their patients throughout the United States have had phenomenal results with the healing factors.

And I attached some links on the WasteWell website about BPC and studies done with healing spine injuries, with healing joint injuries. And there's even a study on safety. And it wasn't in humans, but the safety study was in mammals, dogs, and mice. in humans, but the safety study was in mammals, dogs, and mice. And yeah, it literally talks about how there was zero side effects seen, irregardless of dosage. So this study is gastric pept... That's just BPC. That's the full name of BPC. How do you say it? Pentadeca... Pentadecapeptide. Pentadecapeptide, body protection compound, BBC 157. It's a role in accelerating musculoskeletal soft tissue healing. Yeah.

It works, man. It really does work. It's insane how well it works. Yeah, it works. And so what's sad is, and here, and so as we talk about, there's just so much to cover. Sorry, I did this last time, too. No, no, don't apologize. But as we look at it.

Go wild. As we look at it and we say, okay, what's going to happen? So one of two things, either the FDA will hopefully meet with compounding pharmacies and have the discussion and we can dive a little deeper and hopefully bring them to the light and bring awareness to this. Or they ban these things. And what's going to happen is exactly what happened with the opioid pandemic or epidemic. People are going to turn to black market, right? We had more opioid related deaths last year than ever in the history of the United States. More people have now died of opioids than the Vietnam War.

It is killing young Americans left and right. It's because you allowed Purdue Pharma to push a product into the market that never had safety trials, right? As far as addiction goes, they piggybacked onto a previous indication of their cotton system, get it into the marketplace. All these people get addicted. Boom, let's over-regulate. Let's make it really hard to get opioids. Now everyone turns to black market. And that's exactly what's going to happen with peptides. People are already buying it off the internet. They're buying it from China. They're buying it from black market sources. They're buying it from non-human use sources. And that means that there is no oversight. They do not go through all the protocols and procedures

that we go through at our pharmacy. Like all of the safety nets go through all the protocols and procedures that we go through at our pharmacy. Like all of the safety nets, all of the checks and balances, all the things that I just went through about how we do it are gone. And so now, yeah, you do risk adverse events. You do risk issues because who knows what contaminants in that. Right. Especially if you're getting it from some country and they're cutting corners and they're just selling you whatever they can. And so the fallacy though, the biggest fallacy is that if it comes from a big pharmaceutical company and it's in the American market, that it's safe. Because time and time again, they've misrepresented the safety. They've misrepresented the efficacy. the safety. They've misrepresented the efficacy, right? And then you go beyond that. They've also misrepresented their compliance and regulatory and their quality controls, right? Where I was

going earlier is they've outsourced 30% of their manufacturing to outside of the United States, to third world countries where it's cheaper to manufacture. In fact, a lot of them are manufacturing in rural areas of India, where sometimes there's no running water at the hotels. There's no, so if I'm an FDA inspector and I can choose to go down the street and inspect a compounding pharmacy in Austin, Texas, or I've got to get on a plane and fly to a rural part of India and now I have to give you three months heads up before I come, right? When the FDA shows up at my building, they show up and they say, we're coming in and you're going to let us look at everything you're doing. And we're going to follow your employees around for the next three weeks. And we're going to see if anything they've

done is incorrect. That's the level of scrutiny we face. The level of scrutiny Big Pharma faces is we moved our facilities overseas. You got to give us a three months notice to go into those facilities. And then when you get into those facilities, yeah, there's a book called Bottle of Lies. It's an investigative journalist. I mean, and it's it'll blow your mind. Like when the FDA showed up, they were burning records. That's with three months notice. They were burning records. They made up their efficacy data. The data was all falsified over and over and over again. These things have happened. And I don't remember the author's name, but the book is called Bottle of Lies. And she dives deep into that. She was an investigative journalist. Jesus Christ. So when they're putting these things

on the dangerous list, things like BBC 157, is the idea that they're going to come up with their own version of BBC 157 or something similar to it and patent it because they know the demand is there? That is my assumption is that that's what Big pharma is attempting to do because i don't understand otherwise why the fda all of the sudden would have made this choice blindsided everyone compounding pharmacies clinicians nobody saw this coming because there weren't a bunch of adverse events literally the only adverse events i've seen with anything on that ban list and we've treated i don't even know how many, because Ways to Well has 30,000 patients in our patient population. My pharmacy, the last I saw was over 500,000 people

have filled prescriptions. We're nationwide. We're working with some of the biggest telemedicine companies in the country, clinicians throughout the country. We're one of the bigger pharmacies providing these solutions for these practices. And the only adverse events we've seen is like an injection site inflammation response, an inflammatory response at the injection site. Sometimes it'll itch. The worst is somebody's gotten cold sweats for a few minutes. And that's rare. Those are rare, rare reportants. Like most, this is again, because you look at it, it occurs naturally in nature. It's a peptide. It's an amino acid. It is a building block of life that your body

becomes deficient in as you age, right? Our body becomes less and less efficient. And so these peptides are a way to supplement. My buddy, Ryan Humiston did a video on it he's like a big youtuber and he called it a flintstone vitamins for grown-ups and it's like it is this is the reason like the reason that supplements aren't regulated by the fda is because ronald reagan said i don't want the fda telling me what vitamins i can and can't take right but because this is an injectable and it's sterile for the most part and they're pill forms too but the fda says well if it's an injectable and it's sterile for the most part, and there are pill forms too, but the FDA says, well, if it's an injectable, it's sterile, and it's made at a compounding pharmacy, then we have oversight. But I want to be clear, they didn't ban it. They just put it on a dangerous list. And this is one of the things that makes it difficult to navigate as an entrepreneur is you go, well, what are we supposed to do with that? as an entrepreneur is you go, well, what are we supposed to do with that?

Does that mean we're not allowed to make it? Does that mean we are allowed to make it? You're saying it's dangerous, but we're not having side effects and we're having great efficacious results. It just makes it tough. Insane that they can put something on a dangerous list with no evidence. Yeah, I know. That's wild. I know.

I mean, it just, it just seems like clear cut corruption. Yeah. And because the power of the insurance companies and the power of the pharmaceutical drug companies Well, and then where I get frustrated is i've been to oz joe. I've been behind the fucking curtain I know I was a device rep. I was a drug rep. I stood in surgeries from dusk till dawn Watching products that have never had human safety trials go into the body time and time again. When people think that going into an orthopedic surgery or going into a general surgery or going into an OBGYN surgery, you make the assumption that all these products have been through human safety studies and all this stuff. And I talked about this on

our last podcast too, but over 90% of the products that are in the operating room never went through human safety studies. The FDA created what's called the 510K approval process in the 70s. They said, it's growing too fast. We're bogged down. We can't get to all this shit. Now you're bolting on all these extra products in addition to drugs. And now we're talking biologics and let's not even get into AI and large language models. You know, to their credit, they're doing their best to navigate a really tough space with a

lot of different stuff coming at them. And so they created a loophole. And the premise was less than 10% of the products would come through this channel to get into the operating room. Jump forward to today and 92% of the products in the operating room came in through the 510k approval process. And what is that process? What it says is if you can show something in like kind is already in the operating room, then you can do what's called a daisy chain. So imagine iPhone one versus the new iPhone, right? That's what we're talking about here. Imagine Henry Ford's car versus Elon Musk's Cybertruck.

That's the difference. And it's moving at a breakneck speed. And it's shocking that there's not more adverse events, but we also know that less than 2% of adverse events get reported. And so I can give you a real world example on that too. When I was a rep, there were shavers that kept continually changing, right? And it's a blade that goes in the shoulder and they'd clean up your shoulder and cut out tissue. That tissue has to get sucked through a cannulated component of the shaver handpiece and pumped into a vacuum and disposed of and discarded of the bad tissue,

the tissue that you wanted to extrapolate. As the technology changed and the shaver handpieces got smaller and smaller, a lot of these companies didn't update their packaging inserts. And so they didn't update their sterile processing procedures. And so what happened is tissue began to gunk up in hand pieces. And this was not unique to one company. I'm not going to say the company's names and I'm not going to name the hospitals, but there's a company that took the fall for it. But in reality, I was the rep and I, I, I went in and helped that hospital figure out what was going on. And I took a camera and I scoped every cannulated piece of equipment that I could find. All of it had tissue in it, gunked up tissue from previous surgeries

in that. And so when you take this product from one surgery to the next surgery, to the next surgery, we know that certain bacterias are extremophiles. They can handle, so they auto-quave it. And all that is, is to purify it. It's called clean dirt, the debate at the time was, is there a such thing as clean dirt? If we run it through a sterile processing machine and we cook it at thousands and thousands of degrees, nothing can survive that, right? No. Bacteria is an extremophile. It can fucking make it from outer space on a meteorite and crash onto Earth, you know?

Like these are some of the most resilient life forms in the history of existence. Well, prions, the things that cause mad cow disease, you could cook them at thousands of degrees and they stay alive. Well, and this is where it gets even scarier. So whether we're talking about, like with stem cells, one of the big things that's happened is when they throw out adverse events,

even with the stem cells or biologics products, almost all of those adverse events have nothing to do with the product and everything to do with the chain of command. So look at how rigorous the chain of command is on me as a compounding pharmacy. I told you step by step by step, check, balance, check, balance, check, balance.

None of that exists in big medical, none of it. I was a device rep with shavers, pumps, equipment, implants in my trunk of my car in 110 degree weather. It wasn't just me. Every rep carries product called trunk stock. Drug reps carry product called trunk stock. They put drugs in the trunk of their car and drive around and give them to clinicians to use for samples. But those products aren't being climate controlled in the way they're supposed to be. There's no chain of command. There's no chain of custody. They're not following any of those protocols. And even the storage facilities that almost all of these implant companies are using and device companies, they're not paying for climate controlled storage. Typically, they're sticking them in a storage shed. And then a month later,

that product's going into surgery. And so I'll give you another crazy and I'm saying all this not to bash one company or bash anybody in particular. It's just the truth, Joe. It's the fucking truth. And when the FDA says we're worried about safety on a peptide that's a naturally occurring amino acid I call bullshit because I go then where were you when all this other stuff was happening I was in a surgery at the Houston Zoo where I watched a shaver handpiece being used on a tiger and it had green tape wrapped around it okay and I thought oh that's interesting it had green tape jump forward two months later i'm in a human surgery and i see a shaver handpiece with green tape and i thought man that's wild it can't be so i checked the serial number same damn serial number that was

in that tiger surgery what same serial number at the time what was happening is if a loaner went out it would go out to a animal surgery veterinary clinic there's no way to differentiate right so a count numbers an account number right and so they ship out a loaner and they would use that and then they'd ship it back but okay but they're going to process it clean it sterilize it you never should be doing that in the first place but i've already told you now how the packaging inserts don't explain properly how to clean out these instruments and it's not one company it's not one product it's thousands of products so a human patient could have been potentially contaminated with bacteria from a tiger 100 100%. 100%. You never, you never like, and so I say, I just say this because when they're throwing stones or people are like, peptides are dangerous or stem cells are dangerous.

It's like, this is nature and the rules and the regs and the restrictions and the safety nets and the protocols and the chain of custody and the hoops that we jump through, like let's go to the cellular options, whether we get a biologic, whether cellular or a cellular. Okay. When it ships out, they say what time it shipped. It ships on dry ice stored at frigid temperatures. We, when it arrives, we have to sign for it. And then we immediately unbox it and load it into a cryo freezer and document each lot number what time we put it in the freezer and within 30 days if we don't use that product we discard it even though there's no nothing that says it's not viable uh or it's not

going to be as good that's the protocol because we're going to go above and beyond and follow the most rigid safety protocols and that does not happen in traditional medicine. The average American is assuming that if they go into surgery, that's safe. But these stem cells, man, who knows about that? That could be dangerous. And the truth is, everything's risk reward. It's all risk reward. Jesus Christ.

It's just risk reward. the more it's so confusing because it doesn't seem like there's a way out. Well, and you asked me last time, you were trying to ask me to articulate how I started Ways to Well, how I started Revive, and we spent three fucking hours going through all this. The truth of the matter is I saw a problem. I tried to come up with a solution. And that's all I've been doing over and over again. Problem. There's an opioid epidemic.

It killed my brother. Solution, non-addictive, non-abusive treatment modalities to heal and help with pain. So I start a pharmacy. Insurance says, nah, we're not going to cover it, right? We'll just put them on an opioid. Okay. Problem. Now I have to figure out how to make these products cost-effective enough to be able to sell them to the average American, the average Joe, not the affluent. Everybody needs to be able to afford these treatments. So I built a 503A sterile pharmacy, and we began to make products that were in the gaps. Anything I saw that insurance didn't cover, wouldn't cover, was egregiously price-gouging patients on is what we would make at our compounding pharmacy. And so then we start Ways to Well. You know, Big Pharma wasn't making peptides, but now that the market took off on peptides, Big Pharma is trying to cannibalize peptides and get into that space more and more. Like I said, Merck's looking at over 200 peptides right now. Testosterone therapy, right?

When a lot of times when people say, hey, you know, if it worked, everyone would use it in traditional medicine. No, it took 75 years of dogma and confusion for testosterone to pull itself out of the doldrums of the dungeons to be utilized daily as a go-to resource for aging men. And the only reason testosterone made it out was because one guy had the balls to test it. No pun intended, but it was Dr. Morgan Tyler, a urologist, famous urologist said he, this was prior to Viagra. He said, I've got to do something for these guys who have erectile dysfunction. I don't have an option. And he began using testosterone. And then his colleagues said, well, hold on a second. That's going to cause prostate cancer. And then he began to analyze his patient population

and see that it wasn't increasing prostate cancer in his patient population. So then he went back and did a retrospective study all the way back to the 1930s, where we found out that the original study that created that dogma that maintained its status for over 75 fucking years was total bullshit. It was a patient population of three. Two guys dropped out of the study. One guy had levels that went up and down on his prostate levels, and it was all debunked. And now it's proven time and time again,

if testosterone was increasing prostate cancer, we would have seen a huge spike in prostate cancer. What we're seeing is about 14% of men develop prostate cancer. And so as we walk through- What do you think the reason for that is? For what? Why do 14% of men develop prostate cancer? Well, 14% of men in general patient population develop prostate cancer. General... Yeah, thank you for clarifying that.

Right. Yeah, not so... Not population. Correct. And so the thought was, if we increase certain levels, that we would increase the risk of prostate cancer. And so the challenge becomes, if you really go back and you look at the study, the guy who stayed in the study was chemically

castrated. He had a testosterone level of 50 nanograms per deciliter, which is considered chemically castrated. So non-existent. What Morgan Tyler discovered was when we take you from 50 chemically castrated to low 250, we increase your risk of prostate cancer because your prostate cancer risk at zero testosterone is basically zero, right? But once we push past 250, the low number, we now reduce your risk of prostate cancer. In fact, we insulate you from various forms of cancer beyond prostate cancer. In fact, we insulate you from various forms of cancer beyond prostate cancer. So there's a therapeutic benefit if we get you into optimal ranges. And it's called the saturation model. So think of it like this. You can only water a plant so much,

right? Once that plant has water, it's not going to absorb any more water. The prostate can only, the testosterone can only bind to a certain amount of receptors. Once those receptors are binded, then there's no continual upside risk. And then you get to get the benefits of testosterone that begin to reduce those risks of cancer. But today in primary care, you will still have doctors who quote a study that's been debunked a hundred times and that there's this dogma that exists over and over again in health care where it's like the data's there the research is there the info's there but the system itself isn't allowing for it um and so when we look at that i talked about this on the last when we talk about insurance

companies and pharmacy benefit managers, every drug on the market that is covered by insurance is controlled by a pharmacy benefit manager. And those pharmacy benefit managers prioritize drugs and their classifications, not based off efficacy, based off profits, right? not based off efficacy, based off profits, right? And so they are monetizing those drugs through rebates with the big insurance companies. So insulin's a prime example. The current Senate House Committee

did a study on insulin where they found the price of insulin was $284 a vial. Do you know how much made it back to the pharmaceutical company that was making that insulin? Less than $40. Where the hell did all that extra money go? It went to the pharmacy benefit managers

and the insurance companies through rebates. And so this is the whole other area of healthcare that people aren't understanding and i tried to explain it uh on the last podcast i know we dove deep into it but it is a crucial component for people to get their head around what's happening so insurance companies so many people say well i have health insurance right that drug isn't covered by my health insurance, so it must be bullshit. Or that test isn't covered by my health insurance, so it must be bullshit. No. You don't have health insurance.

What you have is managed care plan. They've renamed these plans. It isn't health insurance. It's a managed care plan. And what do I mean by that? They're managing your medications, your treatment options, and they're monetizing your disease state. They make money on every step of the way. And since the last time we spoke, a new one came out, Ohio, the state of Ohio. They realized that over 200 pharmacies had gone out of

business. The pharmacies were saying we're getting paid less and less, but yet the government was paying more and more. Why? How? Where was that money coming from? Where was it going? When they used, I think, I can't remember, 30-something auditors at the state level,

and what they found was $240 million in pharmacy benefit manager fraud. $240 million in pharmacy benefit manager fraud. $240 million in money that they extrapolated from the American people, from the people of the state of Ohio, because taxpayer dollars are who's paying for this stuff. And these pharmacy benefit managers are making their money on the spread. So there's layer upon layer upon layer of how insurance

companies can move dollars to maximize profits. Jesus Christ. Does that make sense at all? It makes sense, but it's just like the more you talk, the more disheartening it is. Well, I mean, there's two different views on it, right? Optimists are usually successful and pessimists are usually right. I am very optimistic about the future of medicine. I'm very optimistic through large language models, cash pay model. I didn't want to get into that without first setting the tone for the listeners on how we're here. Why did we go to cash pay? Why is ways to well not in the insurance model. Why is Revive not in the insurance model? Because the insurance model no longer exists. That model is meant to monetize your disease, right? So Gary talked about

this. You come in. Let's say I come in and I'm going to give you a perfect example. I'm a mom. I'm stressed. I have anxiety. I'm not sleeping at night. I go to my primary care. That primary care has six minutes with me. It's not their fault. They're doing their best to navigate a shit system. They write me an Ambien and an antidepressant or an anti-anxiety, and they push me out the door. And that's their go-to treatment because that's the tool in their tool belt.

The difference is if somebody were to come in the door of Ways to Well or any of these cash pay clinics, I don't even want to make it about Ways to Well, there are hundreds of phenomenal clinics across the country. Peter Attia is a prime example. He's going to take the time to ask the question, to do the deep dive, to peel back the layers to the onion. Rather than treating the symptom, you're going to uncover the root cause and so what did you do to assess that individual right if it was us we would do a comprehensive blood panel we would identify is there a hormonal imbalance or any sort of imbalance in their biomarkers not going to happen and the insurance model because of what i was telling you the doctors are scared they're scared

of getting kicked off the insurance. They're scared of ending up on a DOJ desk because the data's being skewed, the info's being skewed, all of it. It's one half of the narrative. So that's one reason they won't do it. So that's the biomarker test, okay? Let's look at the other thing we would do.

We would run an EEG to assess, if you have insomnia, anxiety, depression, all of these things, another way to dig into the root cause separate from biomarkers is an EEG to run a brainwave test that tells us, is your brain neurons firing at the posterior of your brain to the prefrontal cortex of your brain? And if you're losing data from the posterior to the prefrontal cortex, what you find is people with depression, with anxiety, with all these things, they're losing 40 to 50% of that neuropathic firing from the rear of their brain to the front of their brain. And this is a simple

$200 test. Okay. Then you go to what Gary brought up. You can do a methylfolate detoxification test, Gary brought up. You can do a methylfolate detoxification test, MTFHR, the motherfucker test is what they call it. And it's a gene carrier test. 40% of people in America suffer from that gene, right? There's four other genes that are part of that test that we do. Any one of those genes can change the way your body processes and detoxifies. They're never going to do that. That isn't covered by insurance. You could do a pharmacogenetic test to see if that individual is even capable of metabolizing the treatment that you're writing them. Do they have a cytochrome P450 variants? Will this even work? How are they processing their food? We can do a gut biome test. We can identify,

do you have a food allergy? Is your gut biome in good working order? Not covered by insurance. Do you get where I'm going? Yeah. There's seven or eight things we should be doing before we ever write you a fucking drug. For sure. Seven or eight easy things. And you're not talking about a million dollars. Like I bet all of those tests combined come out to less than a thousand bucks. And, and I know that's a lot, but you know, how much do you spend on your car payment? How much do you spend on your house? You're spending a portion of your life in that. You're spending 100% of this existence in this flesh vessel and you only get one of

them. What are you going to do with it? Are you going to put your hands, your life in the hands of these fucking assholes that are here to extrapolate money from you and manage you into chronic disease? And I'm not saying the doctors are. The doctors are just using the tools that are in their tool belt. They're using the data and the tools that are in their tool belt. And that's all they know how to do.

And they don't have the time and they're stressed and they're overworked and they're tired and they're just trying to make it. And they're beat down. These people are beat down. And how many of these doctors even know about these tests? A lot of them don't because again, a lot of it's not covered by insurance. And so if it's not in their wheelhouse. And so when you went back to wait, doctors have investments. When I owned a blood lab, one of the things I learned is that clinician's so busy, if there's not a carrot at the end of the stick to have the conversation, to do the deep dive, to explain to them the methodology and the clinical protocols and the why, they're not going to mess with it because they're just, again, trying to make it through the day.

And so those were pathways to be able to educate a clinician and give them some insight into why they should be doing these tests clinically. But yeah, even today, like with, if you talk about cellular therapies, if you talk about peptides, most primary care clinicians in this country have no idea about peptides, or they'll say it's bullshit, or they say they don't work. And they'll say the same thing with cellular therapy. You can't get stem cells in the United States. You can't get that. You know, it's just this dogma that has created a misconception. Infrared. That's another example. You and I were talking about infrared beds and red light therapy.

It is viewed by a lot of the doctors in this health care system and i say health care loosely it's sick care as pseudoscience um bullshit uh chiropractic stuff but if you look infrared and these technologies photo light therapy has been used since 1903, 1905. The guy won a Nobel prize. Huberman does a two hour breakdown on this stuff. It infrared is not bullshit. There are over 60 studies that show infrared works. There was a study done in Europe that showed infrared improved vision in people over the age of 40. Like using three minutes of infrared, three days a week, returned vision and eyesight. There's nothing that has done that.

And so infrared has done that and has helped people with degenerative eye disease, like as your eyes begin to degenerate. And how does it do it? We even know the science behind it. Like it literally, when you're taking NAD drips and you're doing all this stuff, you're doing it to try and get your cells to produce more ATP. Because as we age, our production of ATP decline and ATP is the energy source of a cell. And our

eyes have a limited amount of ATP, but they require a massive amount of energy. And so as we age and our ATP declines, our cells are incapable of having the amount of energy required to maintain great eyesight. And so through infrared, through NAD treatments, through NMN, through all of these various modalities

that are not being utilized in traditional medicine, you can make a difference. Aren't they trying to ban NMN as well? Yeah. It's just crazy. Again, same thing. various modalities that are not being utilized in traditional medicine, you can make a difference. Are they trying to ban NMN as well? Yeah. It's just crazy. Again, same thing.

Where's the negative side effects? And all NMN is is a precursor to NAD. Right. And even NAD, when I sent you that study a year ago, my mind's changed. I'm constantly evolving. I'm constantly learning, right? I've listened to some people in academia that told me they thought NAD was bullshit. And I can tell you, I have a friend who is diagnosed with MS, who's one of my best friends in the world. And he is on a treatment

that costs $14,000 a month from the insurance companies and wasn't getting good results. And we started doing weekly NAD and BPC-157 and he swears. And again, this is anecdotal. I'm not saying that this is going to cure MS. That's not at all. He has gotten better results and has felt better over the last eight months than he ever felt on that $14,000 a month medication. Wow. So for them to understand it, we've got, we would have, and that's why it's like, so to move,

to be able to use these treatment modalities, you almost have to go cash pay. And then what I'm trying to figure out is how do we bring this to the masses? How do we bring longevity-based, predictive, proactive, personalized medicine to the masses? How do we bring this precision approach

to everybody? And that's where I think large language models are going to change the game. They're going to change the world. I sent you Alan the other day, the little alien. I don't like his voice. Yeah. Well, he's a beta, so we're working on getting him all worked out. Yeah. But see, that feedback's amazing because when I talk about personalized. I'm just kidding. It's not real feedback. But for me, this is my thought on it.

Part of being personalized goes above and beyond personalizing treatments with peptides and all these different things to personalizing the patient experience. Some people want to call their clinician at 2 a.m. I can't tell you how many days I wake up and somebody who went through the program messages me asking a clinical question and I've got to bug the clinician and I've got 30 of those, right? Or the clinician gets an inbox filled with questions. The future of medicine is large language models will manage all of that. That large length, that Alan will be able to assess your medical record. He'll be able to read your MRI. He'll be able to read your DEXA. He'll be able to read assess your medical record. He'll be able to read your MRI.

He'll be able to read your DEXA. He'll be able to read your VO2 max. He'll be able to assess your all-cause mortality risk. He'll be able to tie into your wearables, tie into your REM sleep, monitor your heart rate variability. That's proactive predictive medicine. We're going to know what date you started testosterone, what date you started a peptide, what date we began to see improvement

on all of your biomarkers. Or if we don't see improvement, we're going to know in advance that this isn't a good medicine for you. This isn't a good treatment for you. And so traditional medicine is not going to do these things. It's never going to happen. Can you explain when you're saying large language models, you're talking about artificial intelligence? Yeah. Well, so the, the really smart guys like Lex would say, well, large language models are You're talking about artificial intelligence. Yeah. Well, so the really smart guys like Lex would say, well, large language models are just assessing massive amounts of data and guessing the next word. Right. And so chat GPT is a large language model. They don't consider it AI. But isn't the speculation that one of the reasons why they think Sam Altman was pushed out is that ChatGPT has acquired artificial general intelligence

in the newest models? That is what I've heard from my AI guys as well. So I was told that he has a fiduciary duty to the board to disclose if the ChatGPT makes a leap, is what they call it, and it made a leap. And then I guess they continued forward without reporting it to the board. But again, this is all hearsay. I don't know. I don't have any line of sight into that, but my buddies in AI have told me that. Repeatedly hearing this.

Yeah. That was the same thing I heard. Which is very scary. Which is interesting because I will say this, the scary side is like, when you start messing with these large language models, there are behaviors that they do that aren't programmed behaviors, right? I'm not, you know, I've got a small monkey brain. I can't tell you, like, it's a little odd to me, a little intimidating. You're like, man, that's wild. An example is like with Alan, even when I was pressing him and asking different questions and cutting him off he hesitated like and held his hand up and I'm like that's weird and the AI guys were saying this is an example of like things that the large language model is kind of like improvving on its

own that wouldn't be like a programmed behavior so I mean the future is is scary and exciting right and I look at your little AI gives you a finger to hold on? Hold on a second, because I kept changing the questions on him and asking him to reword stuff. And he's not programmed to do that? No, no. And so there's interesting stuff like that. I don't know enough about it because I'm not a tech guy. I've come from healthcare.

But what I see is, like everything, Alan and these AI models are a tool in the tool belt. And any tool can be used for good or for bad. And so my vision for the future of AI and large language models is using that to scale and bring predictive medicine to the masses. When I came on your podcast last time, we had thousands upon thousands of people register.

In my model, a clinician spends 45 minutes with you reviewing your lab results, deep diving into every aspect of you at the biological level, deep diving into your gut biome. Whatever test it is we do, we're going to spend the time and we want to educate and empower patients and give them sovereignty over their health because

they're used to a system where they go in, they're given a drug and they're pushed out and they leave going, well, I don't know. I don't really understand. Why am I taking this? What's wrong with me? Right. I don't want that for them. I want patients to be educated and informed and make autonomous decisions that they drive, right? And so the goal is to use large language models to give them a resource. Imagine if I can take the best and brightest minds in medicine and put them in your fucking pocket 24-7. Imagine if you had Huberman and Atiyah in your pocket and it's 2 a.m. and you got a question about NAD, you just ask Alan. The large language model is going to know all that and he's going to be able to tie it to your medical records and he's going to be able to tie it to the pharmacy and know what date your

prescription shipped. And the only reason I'll be able to do that, and when we go back to data in, data out, right? In our LLM model, it will be a closed infrastructure. I'm not going to give him access to, or the AI, access to the internet, right? The plan is we're going to peer review, we're going to look over anything that's loaded into that algorithm, and we're going to allow him to practice in the way that a Ways to Well clinician would practice and answer questions. He won't be there to provide medical care. He'll be there to be a medical resource. And everything he does, or the AI does will be monitored and approved by clinicians. And but what it does is it allows me to drive down the cost of healthcare, right? Because today, how do I scale? Okay, I can tell you how a lot of my competitors

scale. They hire a doctor by the hour. They outsource the clinician. And that's their way that they got into 50 states overnight. So, so many people are like, why aren't you in 50 states? When are you going to be in all the states? I don't think that's healthcare. I think you're going back to sick care. I don't want an OB-GYN who was pulling babies on a Tuesday doing a testosterone call on a Thursday

with a disease state and a skill set and a knowledge base that she or he doesn't have the knowledge to do you know what I'm you understand I'm not saying that they're not a valid clinician at what they do but you know it's it's like asking a jujitsu guy to teach you Muay Thai I don't I I would rather put my faith in large language models that know jujitsu, that know Muay Thai, that know MMA, that know boxing, that know all of the history of those things and those modalities, that know every single product that we offer at Ways to Well, that immediately can recall your previous conversation, what happened, these large language models. So in the demos, he'll literally chart everything that we discuss and put it in writing and load it into an EMR. You got to understand like when we, when my clinicians do a 45 minute call, they've got to spend 15 minutes reviewing everything, refreshing their memory, trying to go back over everything you talked about. What were your issues? Now they do do the call for 45 now they've got to annotate all that on the back end ai and large language models will do that in real time instantaneously i can only see six patients

per day per clinician in my model because i'm trying to provide them with great care i'm trying to bring the peter attia the the high care approach, but make it affordable for the average person. And so it's been this dance of like, how do we do that? And large language models and AI fix all these problems. And we are on the cusp. It is right there. It is so close. I wanted to show it today, but we're not there yet. And I need to get kinks worked out, but I'm excited for what we're going to be able to do in the future. Now, when you say large language models, what is, what's the engine driving these large language models? Like what program are you guys running? So with, with these avatars that we're going to use is it's going to be, well, today it can be backed by any large language model. So that's just the technology. So think of it as the arrow. But the archer is the clinicians and the data and the input and the information. That's where the magic happens. I think there's going to be hundreds, if not thousands

of avatars in the marketplace within 12 months. But when you say large language models, are you using chat? Yeah, you can use chat. You use chat GPT. There's four other ones that have language capabilities. Doesn't Elon have one now too? Yeah, Elon has one. And it's a race and there's a healthcare one. I can't remember the healthcare one that has access to all these medical records and data. The newest chat GPT outperformed clinicians at reading MRIs. The problem that some people are having with these AI models is that they have biased information. Correct. You know, like if you ask them questions about certain things, they will not answer you or they will not, Joe Biden or they will not praise Donald Trump, like those kind of things where you're getting political or ideological influence. How do you keep that from happening? Google has no moat, this article was basically saying it doesn't matter what large language

model you have because it's only going to act in accordance with the data. And if every large language model has the same accessibility to the same data, then how are you going to differentiate your large language model, right? And if everyone puts the same restrictions and requirements on these large language models, how will it differentiate? Where I'm going with this is ours would be a closed infrastructure. It wouldn't reach out to the internet to get an answer. Any data that we put into our large language model will be approved and peer reviewed by our team of clinicians. So today I have brilliant people on my team. I have Dr. Grant, a board certified urologist. I have Dustin Loveland, an orthopedic surgeon trained under Jimmy Andrews, one of the godfathers of orthopedic surgery. I have Ian White, PhD from the Ansari Stem Cell Institute, 22 years at the bench.

bench, right? And I'm reaching out to thought leaders in their field and in academia throughout the country and saying, hey, do you want to help me do something cool? Do you want to come change the game? We're here. Let's do it. Let's get proactive and predictive and let's help people drive their health journey. Let's give them this resource. And so this tool wouldn't be to talk about politics or to crack jokes with your friend. Our tool would be used to assess large amounts of data, which is what this thing is phenomenal at. It's going to, like I said before, tie into your electronic medical records, review your last consult, be able to read your blood report because it's all analytics driven. Everything is algorithm driven. And so almost all the reports and all of the decision trees that primary care clinicians and even a ways to well clinician makes are essentially algorithms.

And the more data we can give the large language model, the better decisions it can make. And so I'm envisioning there's a day where large language models potentially, you know, take over a lot of the heavy lifting that primary cares and internal medicine doctors do today. Wow. But think about this. It's very promising. That gives me hope. Well, that's where I think there's an optimistic side to it. As long as the FDA doesn't lock you up. Well, it's true. Are you worried about that? About the FDA? About someone.

Yeah, no, I am. I was very nervous on the last call. I don't want to pick a fight with the federal government. That's just not a fight that I'm willing to take on. And that's partially why I got out of the insurance model. I literally described it this way. Joe, it was one of the worst years of my life, man. I lost my brother.

I built this company. I had 156 employees. We were days away from selling this thing, the previous company, for over $30 million. And I was the sole owner. And literally days before, insurance cut all of it out from under us, quit reimbursing everything, got rid of all the genetics testing, all of the, any, any compounded medication, any of it gone overnight. I had to look 150 fucking people in the eye and say, I came up short right at Christmas time, lay off all these people. I paid them all out three months severance. And that, this was four or five years ago. Um, and prior to Ways to Well, and I just thought I'm not ever

doing this again. I can't put, I can't build a model that is in an ecosystem that is controlled by greed and corruption. And so my hope was to build a life raft with Ways to Well and Revive. And I build it and we get all this momentum. Patients are ecstatic. You know, the average Ways to Well person refers me one and a half patients. I mean, it's a cash model. These are people spending their hard earned money. The way you know this works is if it didn't work, I'd be fucking fired. They're not going to spend their paycheck for something that doesn't work. But look at all the people you've referred me. Everyone, for the most part, is ecstatic. Well, I could talk about it personally. I mean, your treatments have helped me tremendously. There's been like that MCL tear that I had on my left knee that just kept fucking

with me. That doesn't exist. I just did rounds on the back, dude. Yeah. It doesn't affect me at all anymore. I mean, stem cells, whether it's mesenchymal stem cells, BPC-157 peptides, all these different modalities, all these different tools that you use, they fucking work. Yeah. 100% work. I'm 56 years old. I mean, I'm supposed to be like an aging, falling apart person. Most people that hit my age, I mean, I'm not even middle-aged, I'm past the border. You know, like middle-aged, what am I going to live to 112? I mean, I'm not even middle-aged. I'm past the border. Middle-aged, what am I going to live to 112? I mean, some people I guess have done it, but it's pretty rare, right?

But if you start talking about driving longevity and driving human lifespan, you start by driving healthspan. And in order to drive healthspan, we've got to take a look under the hood. And so this is where I was going earlier with the insurance stuff. You've got to start thinking of your insurance, your health insurance as managed care. They are there to manage chronic disease, maximize profits. Right. Okay. What do I mean by that?

Think of it like car insurance. Your car insurance is there when you wreck the car. Your car insurance is not there to rotate the tires change the oil and maintain the car dana white had an amazing quote i will never go to a fucking primary care again in this country and he even he articulated it without even knowing he's articulating it and he's not even a health care guy and dana saw it and so well it's based on his own personal recovery the way his bot when when gary brekka started working with him he was you know really overweight pre-diabetic really fucked up and now the guy looks fantastic and what's crazy to me is

like the red light bed what it's done to his face it's crazy like his face. It's crazy. Like his face looks 10 years younger. It's nuts. Well, a lot of people don't understand like that. And again, Huberman did a phenomenal job. I can't remember the exact podcast, but he dove deep into the, and yet this, so when, when these primary cares or your doctor out there says red light therapy is bullshit, they don't know what they're talking about. It's been around since 1905. A guy won a Nobel Prize for using it to treat a disease state. I can't remember all of it. I'll butcher it, so I won't even try. But the gist of it is, there was just a study done in orthopedics that red light therapy helped reduce osteoarthritis better than steroid injections and the other treatment options

that they're using in the marketplace and orthopedics today. And it's not foo-foo pseudoscience. Huberman breaks it down and explains it through using red lights. There's long wave and short wave. Right. And the long wave pierces through the epidermis into all of the tissue in your body, all the way to the cellular level, all the way to your cells, spurring cellular turnover and increasing ATP, which is cellular energy. And so it gives your body the energy needed to heal itself.

It reduces inflammation. It helps with neuropathic pain. It helps with skin tone, skin complexion. It helps with eyesight. But again, these are all things that typically aren't talked about in traditional medicine. Well, like I said, I know it works. I know it works because I'm a part of it. And what's fascinating is the ability to maintain because everyone's worried about getting old and getting decrepit. But if you're not seeing any decline as you age and your ability to maintain your physique, your endurance, your energy levels, we haven't done this before.

This hasn't been something on a large scale that human beings have participated in while they were going through this process of degeneration the natural degeneration that most people most people experience well they get older it's it's a it's such a multitude that you asked me too last time what what uh you asked me about low testosterone and what what could have caused it and i look at that and i go it's everything right like there's another when we get back to red light red light or not red light, green and blue light can increase testosterone levels, right? Not only can, they will, you get it from sunlight. So what you found is if you stand in the sun 30 minutes a day, it drastically improves

testosterone levels. Again, Huberman goes into this too on a different podcast. But how much? He breaks it down. I don't remember the exact specifics, but the gist of it is if you have low testosterone, okay, are you inflamed? What is your diet? Are you working out?

Are you lifting weights? Are you getting sleep? Are you getting sunlight? Are you eating good protein sources? These are all just basic questions that we could ask and dive into to help patients optimize their hormone levels. But what happens if, like for me, I was up at 4 a.m. to go get into the operating room. I stood in the operating room and would come out and it'd be dark again. I didn't see the light of day for freaking like 13 years, like literally. And so I look back now

and I'm like, well, of course, because what happens is if you don't get sunlight, your body upregulates upregulates melatonin and melatonin reduces testicular function and drives down testosterone. And they believe it's because we evolved like essentially being when we were cave dwellers, we would in the winters, in the cold time of the year, our rhythms would change with the environment and we would go and be more indoors. That wasn't the best time to breed or procreate. And so in the spring, in the summer, when there's more sunlight, you're in the sun more and your melatonin level deregulates, your testosterone level upregulates. And all of a sudden, you're fertile. And same thing with women. Women are impacted by this as well. Women have testosterone too.

So if they're not getting enough sunlight, it can kill their sex drive. It can mess up their hormone levels. Well, women have more testosterone than they have estrogen. I know. A lot of people don't realize that. Isn't that wild? Yeah, it is wild. It's the primary sex hormone for both sexes.

Yeah, it's nuts. So Huberman gets into all that, academia, there's tons of studies on this. So and all I think the main reason it's not adopted more often is they're just in the insurance model, right? They use the tool that's in their tool belt. And if that's not a tool in my tool belt, that I'm not going to talk about it it and I don't have time to do it. And that's where I see large language models and an evolving market allowing patients to get that education on their own. They don't have to wait to talk to a doctor, right? I will have a team of academics right there at your fingertips, proactively analyzing everything about you. And I would tell you another, I talked about predictive, proactive, personalized, all that. Another one would be private, private. You do not want this data in the hands of insurance companies. Listen to what Gary Brekka was telling you. He worked for the big insurance companies. He worked to assess your all cause mortality risk and the risk profile to the

insurance company. Right. And so if you if let's just say in a in a miracle world, all of a sudden, Blue Cross Blue Shield rolls out a large language model to streamline your experience and they want to tie into your wearables. The last person you want digging through your underwear drawer is the insurance company because they're going to use it to limit your care, to limit what they cover, and to kick you off a plan, right? They're going to know when the chronic disease is coming and they're going to charge you when they know they can monetize you. And then as soon as you reach a state where they can't, and that's the dangerous side of these large language models. And that's the dangerous side of the tool. And so a sword in the right hands is, you know, one thing and a sword in the wrong hands is a whole other thing.

Jesus. I wonder if they are trying to do that. I wonder if these insurance companies are trying to do that. Oh, they're for sure going to roll that out. Yeah, if they're not already. And that's the problem. insurance companies are for sure going to roll that out. Yeah, if they're not already. And that's the problem. Like when you have an insurance based model, and that's where I would tell you maintain the car outside of the system. Right. And the insurance based large language models

are going to ensure that you stay on these treatments because that's where they're profitable. Correct. So there's the insurance company. And then we broke this down last time. Then there's the pharmacy benefit manager. Pharmacy benefit managers are a middleman between the insurance companies and big pharma. Okay. And they were put in place to negotiate the price of pharmaceutical drugs for the average American because so many drugs were coming into the marketplace. The government couldn't get to and decipher what drugs make sense, what drugs don't make sense.

What should we cover? What should we not cover? So they allowed pharmacy benefit managers to do that. Within a decade, the big insurance companies went out and acquired pharmacy benefit managers. Within a decade from that date, the pharmacy benefit managers began to negotiate rebates to themselves, not discounts to the patient. Okay. So yeah, that's, that's where I was trying to go with this. When I talked about 244 million in fraud in the state of Ohio, how, where's the fraud? And the answer is the margins are made in the mystery. The more confusing the insurance companies can make it and the more condiluted they can make

it, the more profits they can make. They have only a handful of levers they can pull to make money. So let's go over that. They can raise your copay. They can raise your deductible. They can raise your out-of-pocket expense. That's one lever. They can drive down the price of a drug that they buy at a wholesale price point they can mark up the coverage of your care for your employer okay and then they tier price all the pharmacy benefit manager gives a tier pricing that tier pricing is not based on what drug is best for you it is based on what drug is best for their financials. And so they prioritize drugs in a tier pricing under the misnomer to the American people that a tier one drug is the best drug and a tier four drug is not as good. Right. But the truth is a tier four drug is not as profitable because there's a lesser rebate. And so so let's say let's go back to the insulin example. The average price of this insulin is $381 is what the Senate finance committee found $381 on. I can't remember

if it's Sanofi, I think was there, uh, was their price out of that the pharmaceutical company got less than $40. So that remaining 200 something dollars stayed at the pharmacy benefit manager. Okay, pharmacy benefit managers are making billions upon billions of dollars a year. They decide what gets covered, what goes on your insurance plan, what your copay is, what your deductible is, and they can move any lever at any time. So examples, let's go back to GLP-1s, right? The weight loss diabetes medications. Those are showing up on insurance plans as tier four with a really high price tag. Well, you look at that and you go, man, wouldn't insurance companies want to get rid of that because it's costing them a lot? No, because they're showing that the price of a GLP-1 is $1,300. They never paid $1,300. They paid a fraction of that.

But then they go to the patient and they say, hey, this is a tier four drug. You have a 50% copay on this drug. $500. Okay. So they made their money there. They made their money off the rebate from Big Pharma. So the patient pays more than they actually are paying for the drug. Correct. That is what happens on most drugs. And that is why I built a compounding pharmacy. But even if they don't, let's say it's a drug that you think is covered. Okay, maybe the pharmacy benefit manager got it wrong.

A drug entered the market. They didn't know it was going to be a blockbuster. They miscalculated how this was going to play out. They have lever after lever they can pull. Okay, high margin drugs, they've gone out and bought pharmacies. So they own mail order pharmacies. So what they'll do, like when i owned a pharmacy blue cross blue shield they literally said they owed me over a million dollars for one month of shipping out drugs i'd

already shipped all the drugs to their patient i'd already done everything they come in and say yeah we're not going to pay you we don't think you collected the co-pays or deductibles okay we did here's all the records i can show you how soon can you get an auditor out. We want to cooperate. Like we're a small company. We need this money. It's three months before we can get to you. Okay, and then they begin to make it so hard for you to survive in their insurance model. And then you'll be sitting there and a couple months later, knock on the door.

Hey, man, heard it's tough out there for these small pharmacies. You know, we're looking to acquire pharmacies just like you, right? They've gobbled up the lifeblood of America. They've put all these small pharmacies out of business. They now own most of these big juggernaut pharmacies. So even if CVS says we only made $10 of that prescription, what did the pharmacy benefit manager make? OK, or what is the pharmacy, manager make? Okay. Or what is the

pharmacy, your mail order pharmacy making? Lever after lever after lever. Then the last part of it is my buddy who has MS. His MS treatment, I think is $14,000 a month. We just met. I have 260 something employees across both organizations. We met with the insurance company. They're raising our rates because they claim they paid $14,000 a month for his drug, right? He had a huge out of pocket burden on that drug, but was happy because he thought, well, hey man, it was going to be 14 and I only had to pay X. And then they never paid the 14 because they negotiated a rebate on the backend. And then they turn around and they mark up my insurance plan for all my employees every year, year after year.

It is a profit driven system, not a patient outcome driven system. And so that's all I'm trying to hammer home with patients. When you say, why don't you take insurance? Because insurance is the crux of the problem. You cannot operate in that ecosystem and provide quality care. You can't. Everything's controlled. to fix this system. There's no real push to regulate and analyze all of these problems. And what's the downstream effect of these problems? Yeah. And I even hear clinicians talk. A lot of clinicians don't know. Like a lot of clinicians don't even know about pharmacy benefit managers. The only reason I know is because I've been in every aspect of this business and then I would get into it and I go, oh, oh God, that's why that was happening.

Okay, now I get it. Now I get the magic trick. I understand what you're doing here, how you're moving and shifting profits and monetizing disease states. So think about this. If I can monetize your diabetes, why would I cure or prevent your diabetes, right? And I know if I'm a big wig at United or Cigna that you're gonna switch jobs in three years

and by the time that diabetes leads to metabolic disease and a cascade effect that puts you in a hospital that costs me more money, you're somebody else's problem. Or if I can stall it long enough, you're the federal government's problem. And so every aspect of health care is focused on that quarter, on that time frame. Another terrible example of surgery, and this is honest to God. I talked to my buddy who's a president at an orthopedic company. He told me he was sitting down with a surgery center about joints and there's a new joint

that they have and it's more expensive, but the efficacy data of the long-term benefits on it astronomically outperform the other joint that this hospital system was using. He sat down with the CEO of the hospital and he said, here's the data five years out. Here's what we're seeing. Da, da, da, da, da. The CEO said, I don't give a shit what happens five years out. Swear to God, this is a call I had yesterday.

He said he looked me in the eye, Brigham, and he said, if you told me that this joint will last at least 90 days and it's cheaper, that's all I care about. Because all of their data and records and accountability are only on the first 90 days. Once you're out of that 90 day and you've done your little review and all that, you're off again and you're no longer a monetizable patient. And so too, when we talk about primary cares and what's happened, the same thing with pharmacies where they've been gobbled up by insurance companies if they're in the insurance model is the same thing that happened with primary care practices. The day of a primary care being independent and a free thinker is over. They're employed by hospital systems.

Major conglomerates have gone out and bought up the primary care practice. Why? Because now they have the patient population. If I can get you at the primary care level, then I can control the referral of where that primary care sends you as we profiteer off your disease state. Okay, so you go to a primary care. Let's say, let's just walk through the same example I gave earlier, a methylfolate test. They never run that test, right? There's genetics. The methylfolate test tells me my genetics, but there's epigenetics. The choices I make every day impact which genes turn on and which genes turn off. If nobody ever has a conversation with me in my 30s about my hormone levels, about getting into the sun,

about eating right, and you push me towards chronic disease because you wrote me a prescription to treat a symptom and now I go through this system and I get cancer, that primary care is going to refer me to an oncologist. And that oncologist is part of that same system, right? And most people don't know this. 65% of an oncologist's income comes from chemotherapy, from the markup they're making off your chemotherapy, 65%. And I attached that link, Jamie, too, where it talks about this. So all I'm getting at is Russell Brand said this, and he was spot on. Another guy who's not a clinician but understood what's going on here.

If we make things about profits and quarterly earnings and big business and not patient outcomes, and quarterly earnings and big business and not patient outcomes. Don't be shocked when we get phenomenal quarterly earnings and piss poor patient outcomes. 65%. 65. And I attached the link just so we'd have it. So they have a financial incentive. So this is an article where they were trying to, the insurance companies were trying to incentivize them to use a generic

in this instance, because this is one of those issues where there's no rebate and no way for the insurance company to monetize it. But it breaks down how much money these guys, 65% of an oncologist's income comes from that. Wow. This is incredible. And so I say all this again, because I don't think that a clinician's to blame. I don't think that they're just operating in the system that they're given. They're playing with the playing field that's been set before them and the rules of the game that have been set before them. But when patients say, why would I go to Peter Atiyah? Why would I go to Gary Brekka?

Why would I go to Ways to Well? Why would I go to Gary Brekka? Why would I go to Ways to Well? Why would I go to a cash pay clinic? You will not get these treatment modalities and you will not have these conversations and you will not do that deep dive. So in a dream world, what I'm envisioning as we build this multidisciplinary institute here in Austin and we open these facilities across the country

is a lot of the care will be virtual and will be managed from the comfort of your own home, driven by large language models that are tying into your wearables and all those things we talked about earlier. But we first have to establish a baseline. What do I mean by that? If budget was no constraint and you could afford $1,200, I would say you come in, you do a DEXA, you do a VO2 max. Those two data sets alone allow us to calculate your all-cause mortality risk. I know how much visceral fat you have. I know how much subcutaneous fat you have. I know how much lean muscle mass you have on your left quad versus your right quad.

I know your bone mineral density. Then we add in a VO2 max test. If you can be in the top 25% of VO2 max, you reduce all cause mortality by 400%. Okay. So now you combine that with a DEXA. Now you combine that with a gut biome. Now you combine that with a gene test where we know what genes you have, what are your genetics. Now we can help guide you on how to prevent epigenetics, how to prevent and use epigenetics to prevent disease states from chronically manifesting. And we can truly get proactive and predictive. We can truly prevent chronic disease. When you said living to be 106 or 112, whatever you said, Peter Atiyah talks about this too. The difference between somebody dying at the average human life expectancy

and making it to be a centenarian, the only difference is the onset of chronic disease. So today, can we stop or slow the progression of chronic disease and buy brilliant minds like David Sinclair, like Ian White, my stem cell buddy, the progression of chronic disease and by brilliant minds like david sinclair like ian white you know the my stem cell buddy um who's our chief science officer can we buy them time to see if they can unlock the code because when ian breaks it down and i definitely want to get into stem cells i

don't know how far in we are um we're good okay because when ian breaks down when you start talking this isn't me talking like i'm i'm trying to learn like a sponge from people who are way smarter than me like i'm just i'm a simpleton just trying to make it and figure it out but when ian breaks down that we share a common his theory is this in the world of biology we share a common ancestor with species that live 400 years. The Greenland shark lives 400 to 600 years with no cancer. We have a jellyfish that lives eternally in the ocean. It lives over 5,000 years. It can regenerate.

We have salamanders that can regenerate limbs. We have Galapagos tortoise that lives over 200 years. We share a common ancestor with those species. And what that means is within our genetic makeup, within our code, we have the code to access those traits. How do we find those black boxes and activate them? And so for me, when I talk about, you know,

optimists are usually successful, pessimists are usually right. Like I'm optimistic. The future's bright. The opportunity's there. We can do this. Like we, there's so much opportunity, but the first step is to get proactive, to take yourself out of the system, to do the data, because we can't improve what we don't measure. So if you were to come in and establish that baseline that I was talking about earlier, we now have a full comprehensive analysis of where you started the day you started treatment. The only test I hadn't got to yet is an EEG. So for me, Shane introduced me to Wave Neuroscience, super cool company. They're using artificial intelligence. Again, it's a tool, right? It can be used for good or bad. The example of where AI can be used for great things is they use artificial intelligence to analyze an EEG and to put it into a report that a layman, you know, Neanderthal like me can understand. and to put it into a report that a layman, you know, Neanderthal like me can understand.

So they scanned my brain. I was able to look at this report and tell how my neurons are firing, where my neurons are misfiring, how my neurons are losing bandwidth from the posterior of my brain to the prefrontal cortex of my brain. Okay, why is that important? That woman we talked about earlier

that may have anxiety or depression, that's another tool to assess that. We know that it has an 80, over an 80% success rate, way more efficacious than any SSRI, which have been debunked and proven to be bullshit too, way more than any of these antidepressants, anti-anxiety meds, and it's a permanent fix. We scan your brain waves, and then from there, we can use a technology called MERT, which is a magnet, and the AI will give you a precision approach to rewiring your brain. So it uses a magnet to pull those firing neurons down the correct path. And so let me quantify it and give you how an example of how it works for me my brain so the human brain has variances some brains are moving as slow as 6.5 hertz you know top tiers 13 hertz

and that's how fast you can analyze data and so if there was a red dot and i flashed it up on a screen and i flash it once everyone will see that as long as they're above 6.5 hertz. If I flash it twice really fast, anyone below 9.5 hertz, they won't be able to make that signal connect to the prefrontal cortex to assess that it flashed twice. Does that make sense? Okay. So the posterior of my brain moves at 12.5 hertz. That's a really fast brain relative to the average population. That's a really fast brain relative to the average population. But by the time it makes it to the front of my brain, I'm moving at 9.5 Hz. Why? It's years of sleepless nights, stress, anxiety, epigenetics, diet, nutrition, head trauma,

these athletes with concussions. So they're using it mainly to treat athletes with depression from concussions and brain injuries. And we can't fix the anatomical issues of the brain, but we can help those neurons fire appropriately and maximize the delivery of the bandwidth of the signal. And so through brain mapping, we're able to create a precision plan where that magnet is literally tuned to the frequency of my brain and is able to drive that 12.5 Hertz all the way from the posterior to the prefrontal cortex. Have you done this?

Yeah. What did it do for you? I haven't, I haven't gone through the training yet. Yeah. We just got the equipment at ways to well, like last week. Are you going to do it for yourself? Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Cause I'm at nine point, I mean, sorry, 12.5 and at the prefrontal, I'm at 9.5. Okay. That's almost a 20% improvement in brain cognitive function. And so when I love the idea of human optimization, like I love helping people, but like refining people who are already studs. That's fun. I immediately think what about they're using it a lot with high-level operators. They've already signed all these government Department of Defense contracts, and they're using it for Navy SEALs, for snipers, for people who have to make split-second decisions under high-pressure environments. You want that neuron firing all the way through.

I would imagine it would be good for comedy. Oh, dang. I immediately thought of Tony Hinchcliffe because sarcasm is a sign of a really powerful prefrontal cortex. So I was interested in like somebody who's like an improv roaster type. Oh, he's the best at it. Yeah. Yeah. I'd love to find out how his brain is. We're going to have it at the clinic. It's actually going to arrive tomorrow.

Ooh, I want to do it. It's sick. I want to find out what's going on in my brain. It's amazing. So for me, the other thing I found out is I have a, I don't want to call it an anomaly. I have a rare type of brain. Less than 15% of brains have a prefrontal cortex that can fire at the same speed as the posterior is what they were telling me. So I could maximize, I'm not maximizing my brain's potential. So I could maximize, I'm not maximizing my brain's potential. And then I go to, okay, when we talk about the four horsemen, diabetes, atherosclerosis, cancer, and then the last one's neuropathic decline, Alzheimer's and neurodegeneration.

When we begin to use these tools and allow AI to get ahead and get proactive instead of reactive, then we can start to assess your baseline. And now we've monitored not just your biomarkers, not just your gut health, not just your genetics and your neuro wave health. And we can refine that with a precision approach. And the traditional model uses a magnet as well, but it's only indicated if you, let's go back to the insurance. The only indication where you can use this technology and have insurance cover it is somebody who's failed two or more SSRIs. Okay. At that point, you've been taking drugs for over a year. So who knows what's going on? Yeah. And now you're going to take a sick patient and try to optimize their brain. And without this AI, without the AI playing an assistant to it, the max Hertz that that magnet will go is 9.5. Has anyone done an analysis of the impact of nootropics on these? You're going right down the path. Okay. Not that I'm aware of. Are you taking any? Yeah, I take, what is it called? Four sigmatic,

the mushroom nootropics. But the direction we're headed with this, this is another thing I wanted to talk about. I'm glad you said that. We've been talking to Dell Medical School and their Psychedelic Research Institute and a former Rogan alumni, Dr. Rick Dahmer. Not Rick. Doblin? No, Rick Doblin's friend, Dr. Bruce Dahmer. Sorry, Jesus, Bruce. See that firing? Need to speed it up.

Dr. Bruce Dahmer. Well, you've been firing for two hours straight, bro. You're going hard. So we have a letter of intent with Bruce Dahmer, and we're in negotiations with Dell Medical University to be part of their psychedelic research institute. And what that would allow us to do is Bruce has done a spinoff of MAPS, and the premise is it's called Mines, and it's using low-dose psychedelics to see if we can optimize human brain performance. He came on your podcast, I think like 10 years ago.

Yeah, a long time ago. He said y'all played pool, and he left that next morning and went and did ayahuasca and solved some equation that he had been working on for like a decade, and came out the other end of ayahuasca with the answer. What did Poole have to do with it? He said y'all played pool and he was telling you the next day he was going to leave to Peru to do ayahuasca.

So I didn't know if that would refresh your memory on who he was. Oh, no, I remember him. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Super nice guy. But so he's had this vision of could we use psychedelics to solve complicated equations and puzzles and i know

there's like a bunch of mixed reviews on if this is true or not so i don't want to like frick using lsd to come up with the theory of the helix right steve jobs using lsd uh to come up with some of his visionary ideas and so there is a sense of creativity that comes with that. But this gives us a quantifiable, measurable approach to see, did it change neuropathic response? Right? This using the EEG and using the wave neurosciences technology gives us just another tool in the tool belt another assessment tool that's very interesting it's all very well i know that nootropics do have an effect they definitely have an effect on me so i'm fast i would i would really like to try the difference between like trying something like alpha brain black label and then doing that study and see

if it has an impact on whether or not it's more efficient no i'm i'm in the same but and i also am curious uh can we pause real quick so i can take a leak yeah sure sure sure so back to it stem cells all right yeah yeah so um that's another so i i we dove deep into that last time. I want to dive even deeper to explain to the listeners and to clinicians, because so many clinicians will say you cannot get stem cells or stem cells are bullshit or they don't work. So let's break that down again. What we cannot do is clone or manipulate the cells. They have to be a minimally manipulated tissue in the United States. These cells are mesenchymal signaling cells. Dr. Kaplan, who discovered these, thought that they would differentiate. So he called them stem cells.

But what he found is when you put them in the human body, they actually do not differentiate. What he found is when you put them in the human body, they actually do not differentiate. Okay, so this is the biggest confusion. And this is where I think a lot of orthopedic surgeons and there's a whole layer of why. But one, it undercuts surgeries potentially, right? It most certainly did with me. Yeah, yeah. My surgeon was recommending surgery. He was saying, you are going to have to have surgery. This was over 10 years ago. Yeah. And so they don't,

so they're, they're saying, okay, if it doesn't differentiate, then it doesn't do anything. Right. And, and so it's because the term that David Sinclair used, heterochronic parabiosis, right? When you take an old mouse and you combine it, you merge its organ system with a young mouse, the old mouse gets younger, okay? Heterochronic parabiosis happens in a mother when she's pregnant. Dr. Ian White, again, my chief science officer who has educated me on all of this, this isn't me talking.

on all of this. This isn't me talking. He released a study where he talked about this is occurring in a woman when she's pregnant with a child, and we can see it. How do we see it? The glow that the mother has, right? Her heart increases its capacity in the third trimester by 50%. It is not just the mother supporting the baby. It is the baby and young genes and protein codes supporting the mother and helping optimize her health to create an environment that is synergistic for both the baby and the mother that allows that baby to have an optimal environment. Okay. So when we take those cells, right, and orthopedic surgeons say you have to use HSCs. You do. You have to use HSCs if you need them to differentiate. HSCs will differentiate. They'll migrate. What is an HSC? It's a different type of stem cell that they're pulling out of the bone marrow. And so, but the problem with that is to extrapolate that HSC,

you're pulling it from like you, you're in your 50s. You have 50 something year old HSCs, right? We know from the moment of birth, those HSCs viability begin to decline rapidly. And year after year after year, I think it's like one in 10,000 once you're over the age

of 30. You may be getting 10,000 HSCs, but only one of them is a viable HSC that'll actually do anything. And so when we look at what's happening with these cellular treatment options that are placental derived or birth tissue derived, it's the same exact product that they're using over in Panama, that they're using in all these other locations. You're just not allowed to expand them in a Petri dish. And so there's an article that I listed on the WasteWell website because you asked me last time, is there a benefit to expanding the cells?

And my answer was the optimal dosage is the minimal dosage required to elicit the desired response with the minimal side effect profile. What does that mean? Does it work? And did I have side effects? If it works and you didn't have side effects, then there is no reason to add additional risk to a treatment or to manipulate something. And so there was a study where they put 200 million live cells versus 20 million live cells in a heart and both made improvement and the improvement did not differentiate, did not, it was comparable. So when they're doing these treatments, whether it's in Panama or Tijuana and they're doing these Petri dish, well, extract they expand they multiply what is when when they have the dosage what is it based on um well that that they're making an assumption more is better that's

where i'm going with that is that it yeah and so and you're also you're also historically like when an orthopedic surgeon says it's bullshit or it doesn't work, it's because they're misunderstanding the mechanism of action. Okay. They're, they're assuming if an MSC comes from an umbilical cord or from a birth derived tissue, it can't differentiate. And if it can't differentiate, it can't become something. And if it can't become something, then it can't heal something

because it's not going to become a tendon and or a tendon cell and heal that tendon. You have to take a step back and go to the whole analogy of the young rat and the old rat, right? And you look at that and you say, okay, when we put these young vibrant cells in a body, it's not just the cells. Yes, you're getting mesenchymal signaling cells, which are going to go to that site of injury and trigger your body's own cells to come. Those cells transfer their mitochondria into your cells and their job's done. They're out of your system in a few days. Okay.

From that point forward, the magic happens with all the other goodies that are included in that treatment. The extracellular vesicles, the exosomes, the cytokines, the scaffolding, the RNA, right? And so the example I can give is with a facial treatment, right? We do a skin pen and we treat you with cellular treatment modalities and a cellular both. But regardless, it will have RNA. RNA is a message, a messenger code that allows your cells to get a young, healthy message. Like I said, parabiosis, when the mother's pregnant, the baby's also improving her health. It's not just her improving the baby's health. Those same messages are in that tissue that we're putting in your body or on your skin. And what they do is think of it like a construction site. If you're going to build a building, you not only need all the essential elements and essential ingredients or products to build that building, but you also need the blueprint. The RNA is the blueprint. It's the instructions.

And all the extracellular vesicles and all these other items are the goodies and the materials of life that help with the healing process. And so we're essentially attempting to create a perfect environment for healing. Where things have gone south is people have over-promised. They've said it'll cure all sorts of things. It won't, you know, now you've got orthopedists saying they don't work. And it's because of one, people have over-promised to, you know, they don't understand the mechanism of action. And they're, I think they're kind of thinking, well, they're not differentiating, so it wouldn't work. Does that make sense? Yeah, it does make sense.

But we've worked with dozens of NFL athletes. Most of them have not told their team doctors, not because it's banned in the NFL. It's legal in the NFL. Team doctors don't want them to use it. Well, because team, and even then, right? I've talked to a guy recently same situation yeah and so even then the reason they don't want them to use it is okay i'm an orthopedic surgeon i am and when you know that situation behind the scenes you're always on the

bubble the team doctor's interviewing for his job all the time too right so if you're the team doctor and you practice good old traditional 20 year old tried and true orthopedic surgery you're not putting anybody at risk you're not taking anything fringe you're not doing anything outside the norm where another academic guy could question you right so it's playing it safe right and the Hippocratic oath is first do no harm which is the dumbest thing I mean of course do no harm like the goal isn't to not fuck it up the goal is to make this person better like that oath makes no sense to me um and so I I've asked his permission to talk about this and we can talk

about Aaron Aaron Rogers um I met Aaron prior to his injury via his bodywork guy, Aaron Alexander, who I think you've met, crazy fitness guy. And he's helped Aaron with his preseason prep, getting ready for this season. And when Aaron tore his Achilles, I reached out to Aaron Alexander and I said, I would love to try and help Aaron and see if we can help him with this stuff. And that's why when I was talking about the heterochronic parabiosis stuff, he had a great surgeon. He had a great surgery. He took a multidisciplinary approach to his healing. It went above and beyond just doing a surgery to the point where he did cellular treatments.

Those cellular treatments are, for all the reasons I discussed earlier, creating the perfect environment for optimal healing. He used infrared. And I don't want to steal Aaron's thunder because he's got a documentary coming out about it. And I think he's been documenting this entire process. But the fact, even separate from Aaron, the truth of the matter is, I mean, dozens of NFL athletes, um, that have had phenomenal results with this stuff.

I had one guy who was told he was going to be out for eight weeks. He was back practicing in four weeks. I said, did you tell the team doctor? And he was like, fuck, no, I didn't tell him. I didn't want to hear it. I didn't, I would never hear the end of it. And I just think a lot of it comes down to dogma, misunderstanding, frustrations with over-marketing and people promising people the world. out of it if they were they wouldn't be hired by the biggest teams in the world they want the most accredited the most decorated doctors to perform on these incredible athletes that are extremely

valuable to these organizations they're not going to just risk it on some fucking witch doctor yep and but that's where i, where I want people to understand this isn't pseudoscience either. When we talk about the cellular and a cellular treatment options, these are building blocks. These are essential ingredients that would diminish as we age, right? Same thing we talked about earlier. As we get older, we have less and less of these viable cells. We have less and less effective cells. And by giving your body all of these essential building blocks, plus the instructions on how to build via the RNA, now the body's getting young signaling cells, fresh, young,

vibrant signaling cells. So back to what I was saying earlier about bone marrow. Doctors, if you talk to an orthopedic surgeon in this country and you say, I want stem cells, they'll say the only FDA approved stem cell option is bone marrow aspirate. You're right. That's the only indicated option. That's the only option where you can make a claim, right? But there are other options in America that work, that are efficacious.

Now, do they differentiate? No, they don't. But neither does the stuff you're getting in Panama. But the future of stem cells, and Dr. White and I have talked about this, and this is another thing we're going to be doing at the new facility here in Austin, is we're building a state-of-the-art lab. And we are going to do trials. And we are going to do the work at the bench because dr white is on the precipice of being able to use hscs the cells that do differentiate but we will not pull them from bone marrow we will take them from the umbilical cord tissue the youngest healthiest most vibrant cells with all the extracellular vesicles and goodies. And if we can harness those cells and use those cells, they would be able to differentiate.

Now, the reason you would want to do that is down the road to be able to rebuild cartilage or, you know, the critiques that guys have. Like, Jamie, could you pull up? There's a study. Is that on the table? Rebuilding cartilage? In the future. Yeah. That is not what happens today. Has anybody ever acquired that yet?

Yeah, not that I know of. But Dr. White has some really fascinating stuff he's done at the bench. And he's been, that's why he and I were talking about it. Because that's the big one. That's the big one with people that have knee injuries. So there's an article. Can I pause you for one second? Yeah.

When you were talking about this joint that is far more durable, what kind of joint were you talking about? The doctor said I don't give a fuck. I don't know. I don't know. This was my buddy. Was it a knee joint? Yeah, it was a knee joint, but I didn't want to say the company. I thought you were saying.

No, no, no, no. So it's a knee joint. Because the current, like my mom just got a knee replacement. The current one is like you're good for 20 years. My mom just got a knee replacement. The current one is like, you're good for 20 years. And I'm like, Jesus Christ, I can't imagine my mom at 95 having a new knee surgery. Yeah.

You know, which is really kind of, it's a weird thing where you say, put something in my body that's permanent, but not really. Yeah. It's not really permanent. Well, and that's where I'm like, you know, can we delay? Can we offset surgery? So can we delay? Can we offset surgery? Even with these GLP-1s, you know, there's a whole deal that came out, I think, in the Orthopedic Journal where they're talking about now that people are taking GLP-1s and losing all this weight. Right now, there's a spike in orthopedic surgeries because one of the prerequisites is you have to be healthy for surgery. Well, one of the biggest risk factors for knee issues is being obese, right? You've worn that joint out carrying all that weight around. So they want to get the weight off, then do the surgery, right? But what's coming is there will be less of those surgeries

as we get the weight off these people, right? The degenerative knees, yes. You're going to lose a lot of that. And then I look at that and go, in combination therapy of using, getting the weight off, optimizing their health, red light therapy. There's all sorts of studies on red light therapy and osteoarthritis. Jamie, on the Ways to Well link, there's one for, it is umbilical cord derived tissues and osteoarthritis, I think, out of China. I sent that one to you. So there was a study, just came out 2022.

It is literally ultrasound guided. Let's see. Yeah, that's it. So literally, this is what you and I have been talking about. When they say, where's the study? Where's the data? Here you go, dude. Right here. about this when they say where's the study where's the data here you go dude right here

ultrasound ultrasound guided inter-articular injection of expanded umbilical cord mesenchymal stem cells in the knee for osteoarthritis the safety the efficacy and the mri data it basically the synopsis is it works like a huge percentage of the people ended up coming out the other end and even a year out are still having phenomenal results. So it says right here, statistically in significant improvement on MRI scans at 12 months in cartilage loss. So does that mean it's regenerating cartilage? I think it's slowing cartilage loss. Okay. Right. Osteophytes, bone marrow lesions, effusion, and synovitis.

How do you say that? Synovitis? How do you say that word? I don't know. Synovitis? Synovitis. Synovitis. And significant improvements in subchondrialsclerosis. And so when you look at the mechanism of action, right,

I keep going back to the heterochronic parabiosis, right? The average orthopedic surgeon, they're looking at it and saying, these cells don't differentiate. They're not going to produce anything. They're not going to regrow a tendon. You're misunderstanding how they work. You're misunderstanding the mechanism of action. It's providing the ingredients.

It's providing the building blocks. And it's providing the RNA, which is the instruction. Here's an example that's easy to show is, again, my skin. Like we talked about, we've treated, I don't even know, thousands of people. And when you use these cellular treatments on skin, it improves skin elasticity, it reinvigorates the cells, it improves collagen production, and it improves fibroblasts, and it does it through the exact same method. You're getting the message of a young, healthy, vibrant cell. All those little codes in the cellular form of RNA are being loaded into your

cells and telling your cells to act young again, essentially. And it's causing, I don't want to call it a reversing in aging but it's definitely slowing aging and improving cellular health and then you combine that with things like red light therapy and all these different treatment modalities they're being ignored uh and they are backed by science like i mean i can send you i didn't tag them on the wastewell website but i could send jamie dozens of articles or you could listen to Huberman where he breaks it down. It's wild shit, man.

It's really interesting, the resistance to it. That's what's really interesting by people that are ignorant. It's interesting that they would want to resist despite all the anecdotal evidence and now actual scientific studies. Well, and even with Aaron, Aaron Rodgers, he just got interviewed on something ESPN or one of them two days ago. And he's such a nice guy. Like he's such a good dude. Literally, they were saying the new conspiracy theory is you didn't really tear your Achilles or it was a partial tear. And Aaron was so gracious about it and said, well, Hey, I'm glad that Americans are

now questioning things instead of just basically like a few years ago, they weren't. And they're saying this just because he's recovered so quickly. Yeah. Yeah. And it's a multitude of things. It's Aaron is a phenomenal athlete. Aaron primed his body. Aaron had a phenomenal surgeon.

They did use an Arthrex technique. And a lot of people are saying it was a state of the art. The Arthrex technique was being used a decade ago when I was in the operating room. So it is a procedure that's been around. Now I do know one of the unique things they did with Aaron was, or not unique, but one of the newer things they did was an internal brace, which gives you a little bit more protection in the early phases of the healing process. But Aaron's recovery, Aaron getting approved by the clinicians to get on the field faster, all of those things are because Aaron thought outside the box and Aaron is doing all of these extra things that, you know, I think most traditional medicine is ignoring.

And Aaron was open-minded enough to do that. And ways to well. I mean, you're not taking credit for it, but that's how he found out about all these things. Yeah. Well, I think he's, Aaron got, Aaron Alexander was big into red light therapy, talked to Aaron about that hyperbaric. It's just methodically using the technology that's out there and building upon the great work that that surgeon already did. Right. I don't want to take credit away from any of those guys or from Aaron and his hard work

and his dedication that he put into that. This is the technique. Yeah. So there's the rip and the Achilles and then they suture it, bring it all together. It is amazing how they do it now in comparison to the way they used to do it. Yeah. And I, and I have even, No, it's okay. We get it. But Aaron was telling me, Aaron Alexander, not Aaron Rogers,

was telling me that the clinical team was looking at his Achilles and were very impressed with how much blood flow and how healthy the Achilles and were very impressed with how much blood flow and how healthy the Achilles already was. And so, you know, I mean, that's a catastrophic injury and his recovery time is amazing. And it's because of all the things he's doing. It's been like 11 weeks. I don't know the exact, but it's nuts. It's something crazy like that. Yeah. But I mean, again, he's worked his ass off and he's done all the right things and he's got a documentary that's going to show the world all the things that he did and how

hard he worked to get back for that team. Um, so I just think it's really, really cool stuff. I'm not taking credit for his healing. I'm thankful that we got to play a small part, but I just think the main gist of that message is there are, are other alternative treatment options. And I think a lot of times orthopedic surgeons view it as we're trying to say not to have surgery. There are times where you definitely need surgery. And my message is when you have surgery, why would you not want to put your body in an environment that is conducive to healing? Why would you not want to put your body in an environment that is conducive to healing?

Why would you not want to optimize that? Whether it's through cellular treatments, a cellular treatments, peptides, which, you know, again, we were limited with what we could treat Aaron with because he's an NFL athlete. So we weren't allowed to do things that we would do if somebody, you know, if you're just the average Joe and you tear your ACL doing jujitsu, man, I would tell you, we should absolutely take a, throw in everything at the kitchen sink at you to heal. Like, why would you not, you know, whether that's IGF, whether that's testosterone optimization,

red light therapy, hyperbaric, all of those things are going to contribute to the healing process yes well listen man we covered a lot there's going to be a bunch of people going over this with fucking notes and trying to remember everything but i think what you're doing is very important and i think the message i'm very happy that we can get that message out there because there's a lot of people and including me that didn't really understand how difficult the situation truly was until it's laid out in a comprehensive manner and you know this is the reason why you're getting bad information from your primary physician this is a reason why you're getting bad information from orthopedic surgeons it's a complicated fucked-up

convoluted system that is compromised by money. Yep. It is. But the message too is there's hope. There's hope. And there's so much amazing things coming. The future's bright. We ran out of time. We didn't even get into CRISPR and all the things that are coming in the future. But I'm hoping to be on the cutting edge of that. So the last thing I'll say is if you're a PhD, if you're in academia, if you're interested in these things, if you want to make a difference in the world, we're hiring. We're hiring pharmacists, we're hiring pharmacy techs, we're hiring across the board, nurse practitioners, if you're any of it, any and all of it. And also to anyone who's part of that AI world and tech world.

I've been bugging Lex to try and hook me up with some of his contacts, but it hasn't manifested yet. So we're looking for all those positions if you're sick of being part of a broken system. Beautiful. All right, brother. Thank you. I appreciate it. Thanks for being here. Bye, everybody. Thank you.